There are things that stick in your mind even when you hate them. Especially when you hate them. But I didn’t hate Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, I just found it gory. I watched it in a friend’s place in Jakarta two days ago (yeah right! A smartass as I am, I wrote a 16-page essay on Todd, which I split into 5 posts in this blog, without having watched it before). Apart from my salute to Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, there’s too much blood gushing and O Boy, Mr. T slits too many throats! It is worth watching, but to me it’s not worth collecting (I can’t let my daughter watch it for anything, that’s for sure). Or is it not, really?
I got back from Jakarta this morning and found myself humming the tune of Johanna – a song from the musicals – over and over. I cannot stop thinking about the movie and the story. After all, Burton is a consistent director: his movies have ‘that’ feel, like a heavy stone is accidentally left inside you. Sweeney Todd is pure tragedy. You don’t know what to feel about the hero/villain, you don’t know how to feel about his predicaments, and you don’t know how you feel about hope reluctantly offered at the end of the movie.
You don’t know if anything as fatal as killing your loved ones, literally and figuratively speaking, or even killing your capacity to love, could be strictly limited to fictions
May 4, 2008...11:33 am
Mr. Todd, finale
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